Review of Bruno Strasser’s “The Experimenter’s Museum: GenBank, Natural History, and the Moral Economies of Biomedicine

摘要

In 2007, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison observed that "epistemic virtues do not annihilate one another like rival armies. Rather, they accumulate." Moreover, "When epistemic virtues confront one another, so do scientific selves [. . .] Where one side sees a breach of scientific integrity, another may see loyalty to the discipline's highest standards" (Objectivity. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2007: 363, 367). This analysis succinctly summarises the main argument of Bruno Strasser's article, which is a natural companion piece to the history of the scientific 'atlas' that Daston and Galison have so richly described. Strasser's article about the construction in the 1980s of GenBank, an open-access digital repository of nucleic acid sequences, weaves a narrative around a clash between the experimental and natural-historical scientific traditions. That narrative is compelling, and the argument intriguing. The article connects the rise of the computer database with the natural-historical collecting traditions, from early modern Wunderkammer to Victorian museums and botanic gardens. It carefully and thoroughly documents the intellectual, inter-personal struggle that resulted in the creation of GenBank and the emergence of what Strasser describes as a "hybrid culture" in which the experimental method that produced individual sequences was combined with the natural-historical method of collation (61, 96). This "hybrid culture" of practices, he argues, signalled the end of the "predominantly experimental tradition" in the life sciences (96). Its coming into being involved the sometimes fractious encounters of individual scientists and their respective institutions. This scientific cultural antagonism centred on differences of received opinion about the ethics of scientific credit, attribution, and rights of ownership. If a hundred scientists create a hundred DNA sequences, can the collector of all one hundred make a proprietary claim on the collection. What rights do the individual producers of those sequences retain